Not Just a River In India

boycotting menopause, it touched a nerve with a few readers. I didn't mean to imply that I wanted to "cure" menopause, which isn't possible, though curing some of the symptoms might be nice. I meant that I found the word itself was often used erroneously – used interchangeably with perimenopause, for example, — and that for me, the word still held some fusty connotations that I wasn't quite ready to embrace. But perhaps, "Denial is not just a river in India," as one of my students once wrote in an essay. And perhaps wanting to change the word is part of being in denial?

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"It's a natural stage of life that happens to every woman in the world as she moves away from youth and fertility to become an older person," wrote reader Sue Brayne, a British psychologist and author of an upcoming book on menopause. "There's nothing wrong, unusual, different, unnatural or bad about this." And she's right.

And yet, perhaps because I'm still slightly in denial about my own natural process, or perhaps because I'm at the very tail end of the self-centered baby boom generation, part of me still wants to fight the word and come up with a fresher sounding alternative.

More From Woman's Day

If you change the language you change the culture. And yet the reverse is also true: if you change the culture around the word menopause – sing musicals, film documentaries, write books about it – you also change the culture and spread the word that menopause is no longer something to be feared, hushed up, or necessarily medicalized, but something to be embraced and proud of. I'd like to think I'm getting there.